Review : Lips for Xbox 360

Score: 70 Singing Strong!


In the last two weeks i’ve played Microsoft’s new karaoke singing game Lips while taking a break from packing and moving all my worldly possessions in cardboard boxes. Lips was developed by acclaimed Japanese music game developer INiS who previously made Gitaroo Man, Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents and it uses two new slick motion-sensitive wireless microphones made by Microsoft. In fact if you look back you can see that it was me that first broke the news that “Lips” was actually going to be a piece of hardware as well as software. (Of course I totally got the release timeline wrong)

This is Microsoft first music game in a long time and is no doubt meant to fill a gap created by Sony’s Singstar that I hear is quite popular in Europe. Lips is probably more important to Microsoft outside the US. They developed a North American, British, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian and Australian versions with a unique song lists in each region of the world.

I can only really speak for the 40 songs included on the North American version that I played. There are some good songs on it but it has a lot of bubble gum pop songs that are not really my cup of tea. In fact I completely got the idea that I was not the target audience for this soundtrack. I figured that they were aiming to appeal to a younger and female demographic than hard core video game nerds like me who rock out to Rock Band. Lips is likely for the ladies. I did like “Call Me”, “Bust A Move”, “Take on Me”, “Hungry Like the Wolf”, “In Bloom”, “Personal Jesus”, “Another One Bites the Dust” and “I Want to be Sedated”. I guess that the cost of licensing a song and video is one of the reasons why the version was limited to only 40 songs. I also purchased and downloaded “The Sign” by Ace of Base and a country version of “The Dreidel Song” (they also have some other holiday songs on-sale but a country hee-haw version of a Jewish childrens song was to kitsch to pass up).

The game has a very slick visual and audio interface and feels very polished. The premise has you singing along to a song while the lyrics are displayed on the screen with a bouncing ball and suggested pitch line. This is all in front of a music video and most are to the original videos dating back from the days when MTV actually played music videos. There also is a optional virtual music video of some animated 3d figures dancing to the song. The one video that made me scratch my head is an original video to “Ring of Fire” that has magical anime snakes fighting over giant ice cream cones that drop from the sky (I am not making it up.. I swear it is in there).

Lips is actually the most technically advanced singing game since they not only keep track your pitch and timing but the software compares your singing to the master audio in the original version and check phoneme recognition. It rewards you for following the lyrics and correctly pronouncing them on time. You can’t just hum along and fake it to get buy like you can in Rock Band.

It is not possible to fail out of a song in Lips but it is all about getting a higher score and doing a better job singing.

Lips Screenshots

Lips Screenshots

Lips was clearly designed to be a “party game” and does not have real time online game play but all you have to do to join in into a duet is pick up the other mic and give it a shake. You can sort of play against a friend online by issuing them a challenge and seeing if they can out sing you but this is not done in real time.

The biggest new feature in Lips is the ability to sing your own ripped MP3s or WMAs off a USB device, streamed off a PC or ripped to the Xbox hard drive. There are no lyrics or on origional video when you do this but you can sing to your own music for free and it will turn down what it thinks is the vocals through a filter. It was not as nice as singing along to a master track song but it did work well. I did run into a problem with my iPod when I had way more songs on the device than the game was capable of listing and it sort of locked up and I had to go back to the Xbox dashboard. I hope they fix this in a title update because I would like to get the achievement for adding 300 external songs someday. I actually got the duet achievement by holding both mics up to my mouth and singing into both of them.

Lips Screenshots

Lips Screenshots

The game retails for $70 for 40 songs with the two microphones (with batteries included). Now the mics are a lot more slick than I had imagined.

They feel good in your hand and are weighted like the professional audio mic that I used to announce play by play Roller derby games. There is a “Chill” White mic that matches the Xbox 360 and a black “Elite” mic. The spots and lettering on the mic is actually a rapidly color changing light that will pulse and shift color to match the video. It is quite a disco effect. They also have a motion sensitive gyroscope that can detect swinging movements and tilts. There are parts in the song where you have to tilt the mic above your head or swing it up in the air in sync with the song to trigger a multiplier score bonus. This also might have been one of the piece of hardware that Microsoft was looking for a hardware engineer to work on (runs on batteries, wireless communication, and has a gyroscope). This is a good sign that if Microsoft ends up doing a motion sensitive wand controller it will be up to the task. I like the mics a lot and it is too bad that Rock Band 2 and well as Guitar Hero World Tour it right now. Harmonix is working on getting these working with Rock Band 2 in a future title update.

I still am a little surprised they actually called it Lips and I was sure that “Lips” was a hardware codeword like “Xenon”, “Zephyr”, “Falcon”, “Jasper”, “Opus”, “Valhalla” and “Phoenix”. Lips is not the end all music game with a plethora of plastic instruments. It is a very well put together karaoke game that was a lot of fun to play and I see that they are going to internationalize it and keep it fresh with new songs. Sure it is a “Singstar clone” but there was plenty of karaoke around before that and INiS has an impressive pedigree of innovative music video games. I just would have preferred more rock and metal! The rap songs in Lips were a fun to play and if they ever made a 100% Hip Hop and Rap version of Lips it would be a sure fire hit.

I’ve really tried hard to write this review without a cheesy pun on the names but these Lips does not suck! Ha!
